Ideas

Multiple languages blogging. A core solution?

differing languages have been a problem for ever, and they continue to be.

when you think of the incredible amount of time and massive globs of money spent on translations, and add to that the huge gap between people who speak different languages, i have to wonder; how hard would it actually be to develop a very basic, common language?

many people/students take at least one language course. why not all take THE SAME course - a universal language - and begin to close the gap?

2 wp.Man: your idea is awesome, but it is hard to implement :(
Basically, now international language - is English. But English is not good, because it is not simple enough for everyone to learn. wp.Man, you're right, it would be better to create universal language. Many years ago people had the same idea about Esperanto - global language, but it didn't worked. Main reason - the developers of that language divided about core properties of language.

There is also Interlingua, but the point here is not that we must have a common language: my opinion (and not just mine) is that human will never get a common language, because we are simply too bound to our traditions (and I believe is a good thing).

Here the point is how to make WordPress more multilanguage friendly. Some people think that would make WordPress core too "dirty", considering that most of the users doesn't really need this... and probably they're right.

But an option could be the one take for WPMU: initially a parallel project, as not everyone needed it, the they merged the two projects and I suppose they managed to find a way to make it "clean".

Same thing could be fora theoretical WPML project (sorry Amir, but this is the only name that makes sense), maybe with a partnership with WPML guys.

For the moment I stick to WPML, that despite its glitches, is still the best solution out there.

WordPress should have core support for writing content in multiple languages, definitely.

As for now I use WPMU and two separate sites for multilingual purposes. It's not the easiest solution for editors but it does not depend on any plugins or upgrades and is bullet-proof. Usually those sites are not blogs but corporate, personal and promo websites and they are not updated on a daily basis so my solution works.

paddelboot, I've tried your plugin recently. It looks promising but I decided to go without it - that was a website of advertising agency, with portfolio and some static information, so there's no blog and large amount of pages to translate and it's pretty easy to keep two language versions in sync manually. Anyway, your work is good, hope it will become a beta soon and will take its place under the sun. I will give it another try on one of my next projects.

Angry Creative - That's a common misconception, that plugins provide proprietary code or are half-assed. They are, actually, how things move from an idea to a core-reality. Menus, for example, was a plugin, and Multisite a totally separate product.

FWIW, I know the core guys are looking at a better multi-language system, but it's a terribly complex beast. While you can upload the language packs to switch the back end, running multiple front end languages is a complicated topic.